Don’t Repeal Any Laws, Repeal John Boehner
"They didn’t come to pass legislation. They came to burn the place down."
. . .
Boehner is handing them his trusty Bic lighter. Yes, a man wants to hold on to his job, I understand that. And yes, a speaker shouldn’t necessarily tip his hand on how he feels about an issue—immigration, say—until later in the process. But is Boehner being canny, or a coward? Virtually everything Boehner says publicly is designed to placate the pyromaniacs. And if he’s ever said anything behind closed doors designed to challenge them, they’ve kept it an awfully good secret (which would not happen; it would be leaked within seconds to ensure that he felt the lash of the Tea Partying millions).
They have brought us to a place we’ve never been before: post-governance America. Oh, they have to pass some bills to keep Social Security checks going out, defense contractors being paid, that sort of thing. But passing the minimal number of bills needed to keep the economy from crashing to Middle Earth isn’t the same thing as legislating. Or compromising. Those, they won’t do. As Jonathan Chait notes this week, their “negotiating” position with Obama is this: We’ll raise the debt ceiling for the rest of your term. All you have to do is sign the Ryan budget into law and privatize Medicare. Right.
I don’t see any way out of this. We are stuck here for years. In all likelihood, because of the 2010 gerrymandering, the Republicans are going to control the House at least until 2021. That’s eight. More. Years. And Boehner, let us not forget, is the “moderate” among those in the leadership. Say he lets an immigration vote happen and pisses off back to Cincinnati (Cincinnati? What am I saying? He’ll become a corporate lobbyist and buy a nice house in Leesburg.) Then we get Speaker Eric Cantor, or Speaker Paul Ryan. I have trouble envisioning what “worse” could be, but it would most certainly get worse under either of those two.
This isn’t a partisan crisis. It’s a historical crisis. And the political system can’t solve it. We need leaders from other walks of life, especially from the various branches of the business world, to stand up and say to the Republicans that dysfunction cannot be your mission. You must govern. Govern conservatively, but govern. And we need, as I’ve said before, big-dollar organizations that can boot some of these people out of office and replace them with a few Dick Lugars. We don’t need to repeal any laws. Repealing a hundred or so people is what we need.
THE REST:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/24/don-t-repeal-any-laws-repeal-john-boehner.html
